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Comment by psutor | Hacker News Reader

No, I am not, I am very white and nerdy.

I am surprised at how much of the discussion here has focused on race and racism. I don't see that being a factor here; this is simply how public schools in America work.

I did not, however, have a perfect disciplinary record; I had been suspended a couple times for "hacking" type activity.

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Well, IMHO, this story is about racism. I've read too many stories on african americans ending up with criminal records for things I've seen non-african americans do without consequence. Also, I have a similar experience with chemistry class in high school. While a white kid burned holes, dropped chemicals he had no business messing with, and other moderate damage to school property more than 5 times, _in front of everyone including the teacher_. I did one thing, that didn't endager anyone, didn't break anything. I booted up an old AppleII computer and played music on it(the bubble-bobble invincibility theme music I coded in BASIC)..... ended up in the priciple's office for "tampering with chemistry class computer system". This computer wasn't doing anything; it was covered in dust. Mom & I went to the principle and, as it turns out, the principle totally tore up the write-up from my chemistry teacher in front of us, then she said "Don't worry about it. I know that teacher of yours. This isn't going on any records. It ends here." She was white, in case that impacts this little story of mine. Chemistry teacher was a white male. And my parents were born & raised in Nigeria.

I'm sorry that you had that unfair experience. However, the same story could have happened if you were white (it's very very common for some people to be more disliked by a teacher than others, or less good at concealing their actions - resulting in selective enforcement), but then you wouldn't have white racism to blame for the unfairness of it, and no basis on which to get public sympathy. That kind of thing occurs for many reasons and no reason, all the time.

So, indeed this can happen if you're white - as shown by the person I was just replying to. Let's go with that for a moment: The nasty gotcha-part of this is that while it may or may not happen completely randomly with no particular concentration on minorities, the way out of the situation is not equally accessible. Since minorities tend to have less financial resources(for reasons we'll avoid talking about right now), they're much less likely to have a lawyer like psutor's parents had. If both me & him got a felony charge thrown at us, he'd get out of it. I don't think my parents could afford a lawyer at that time. This is kind of an important element. Even if whites & blacks get charged with the same frequency(and I don't believe that), the chances of the white(or asian) family having the money to get a lawyer to fight are much higher. Kinda like how kids of rich families can kill people in a drunk driving incident and get away with little consequence. Money and race have an impact on the how severe your punishment will be for a particular crime and even the probability that your crime will be reported in the first place.

You are surprised at how much the discussion has focused on race? You must be somewhat sheltered. I am white and nerdy and a relative new comer to the United States and not particularly interested in race issues but even I know that race disparities in both arrests and incarcerations are huge. Black females are imprisoned 3 times as much as white females, and make that 6 times for black males. Do you really think that this girl has the same chances as if she were white?

Blind comparison of imprisonment rates is misleading when you ignore confounding variables like income, geographic distribution, parental age and marital status.

Step 1. Send black teens to courts twice as often as white teens.

Step 2. Pass them through to adult courts twice as often as white teens.

Step 3. Keep them in prisons 60% longer for the same crimes.

Step 4. Use big words like "confounding variables" to pretend that it's complicated.

Sources:

http://www.iamforkids.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Promise...

http://www.allgov.com/news/top-stories/black-americans-given...

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